5 ms·

> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? I get that the charm of Twitter to many is brevity. But it might do

by byuu 11y ago

> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? I get that the charm of Twitter to many is brevity. But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. It may have been fine when it was just your friends chatting about what was going on during the weekend; but it's especially egregious when it's politicians or scientists trying to condense important subjects into 140-characters, which then get regurgitated on the nightly news. Like we're all a bunch of 14-year olds texting each other. Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings. I think it'd really help if Twitter were based on word count instead of character count (and didn't count articles), so people could at least write like adults. And if you really need more than a sentence or two, then allow for a long-form text box that'd turn into a clickable "More ..." link after the summary message. Those that don't want to read much can simply ignore such links, and unfollow repeat offenders. Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.)

derefr 11y ago
> You can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.) Can you really? I thought the "140 character" restriction was due to the "160 bytes in an SMS" restriction, and therefore using multibyte unicode characters consumed multiple "characters."
- varjag 11y ago
  Yes you absolutely can. Similarly, with Russian you'd convey a quarter less information than in English tweet, as the words are stupidly long.
- mikeash 11y ago
  You can try it for yourself. Go to twitter.com and put 象 into the box. The number of remaining characters only goes down by one. I don't know why that is, because I'm pretty sure you're right that the tweet length limit comes from SMS limits. But these days the 140 limit seems to be in terms of Unicode code points, not bytes.
- richardwhiuk 11y ago
  Twitter's web UI suggests it's allowed, and I can post 140 象 in one tweet. In practice, tweets get fragmented into multiple SMS anyway, so while this might have been the aim, it's not the implementation they've ended up with. Also, while you may wish SMS was Unicode, that's not actually likely. The number of characters you can fit in one SMS will vary depending on whether you use more than one charset, and what your operator and device support. Most SMS in the US/UK/Aus etc will be sent as 7 bit GSM, allowing for 160 characters. 8 bit allows for 140 and UCS-2 allows for 70. (This is assuming no UDH, i.e. no fragmentation)
  - kuschku 11y ago
    I can send fully unicode SMS here in Germany, and while my old phone doesn’t support all the characters, it definitely displays even multibyte characters properly.
    - cbr 11y ago
      Are you sure that's SMS and not MMS or one of the other upgrades to SMS people still call SMS?
      - kuschku 11y ago
        It’s SMS, as we have to pay extra per character for sending and receiving MMS. (Yes, you can bankrupt someone by sending them a bunch of MMS)
- Nadya 11y ago
  They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter". It's also why Twitter is really popular in Japan. 140 characters is more than enough to hold actual conversations (even if most statements/responses are typically 12-20 characters and the rest of the space is used for emoji)
  - comex 11y ago
    Which one might call a "natural experiment" for how increasing the limit would affect English speakers' use of the service. (But I don't think Twitter will do it - the number 140 is so well known, it's basically part of its identity.)
  - byuu 11y ago
    I think Twitter's popularity in Japan, despite the fact that 140 characters there can convey a message that's 3-4x larger than in English, is indicative that increasing the English character count to somewhere between 280-560 (or much better, moving to word counts instead) would not be the death sentence for the service that many make it out to be.
    - laxk 11y ago
      Youalsoneedtointroducemaxwordlengthinthatcase.
      - Nadya 11y ago
        How would that work for non-spaced languages?
  - e12e 11y ago
    FYI as has been posted to hn earlier wrt why sms were 160 characters, which lead to 140 character tweets w/20 characters reserved for user names: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-... It's rather interesting that the 160 character limit isn't arbitrary - but also doesn't account for eg: URLs in text.
- afarrell 11y ago
  Yes, this was the basis for the Ksplice longest tweet contest https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/the_1st_international_longest_tweet https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/the_1st_international...
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  SMS has 140 bytes, not 160. It allowed 160 characters because they were 7-bit.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  That was the original reason, but they only hold onto it now because that's what makes it Twitter.
ryandrake 11y ago
Yea, it's a terrible gap in our current technology that there are no other promotional or publishing platforms out there without this limit, that would allow scientists and politicians to finally convey more verbose messages. One day maybe someone will invent one.
- byuu 11y ago
  Snark aside, I do sympathize. It isn't Twitter's fault that it became so popular that very important people have taken to it to post things that really do not belong on a 140-character-per-message service. I also can't entirely blame the people using Twitter improperly: they need to get a message out to as many people as possible, and far too many only read Twitter; so they can't exactly ignore the platform in principle. I'm not suggesting Twitter turn into Livejournal and have no limits. I'd just like to see people not get penalized for having a language with bad character-to-word ratios, for spelling out words properly, or for having a richer vocabulary. There has to be a middle-ground between 140 characters and 300KB of text with lots of pictures and video. And if people really need to go over a reasonable limit, Twitter can streamline the process of writing a blog-post and submitting a t.co link to it. Something people already do anyway, just through other services where Twitter loses the page views (and opportunities for advertising.)
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    I wasn't aware that anything on Twitter was important.
nemothekid 11y ago
>But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. I see this thrown around a lot, but I don't think removing the 140 character limit will suddenly make Twitter a bastion of thoughtful and intelligent discourse. Twitter is huge, and the "intelligent" discourse I would expect to grow on Twitter would probably be the same "intelligent" discourse Reddit has had for years. I still believe the character limit on tweets makes it effective for users of Twitter to consume a lot of content from a wide range of people. To me, the end 140 character limit, would be the beginning of artificially curated streams (like Facebook). 50 140-char tweets from 45 different people likely has very different engagement than 10 500-word tweets from 10 people. At that point, whats the difference between Twitter and Tumblr?
thefreeman 11y ago
The most frustrating thing to me is people ahve taken to posting screenshots of their press releases that we cannot properly zoom or copy and paste. Thank god for 140 character limit!
Coding_Cat 11y ago
>Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. I don't see how abbreviations or vocabulary change the substance in any way. The only thing it changes is your mindset, and there is something to be said for adopting one's writing to this effect, but in essence: if you are swayed by someone's tone or style instead of substance then that speaks ill of you, not the speaker. edit: if you are going to be pedantic about other people's writing: `etc' should be followed by a full stop. ;) >Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings. This is a serious problem for discourse on twitter though, and people have already taken to working around the 140 character limit such as writing (1/4) and tweeting 4 times, or using twitlonger.
- sigmaml 11y ago
  > if you are swayed by someone's tone or style instead of substance then that speaks ill of you, not the speaker. Gratuitous arrogance! Humans have feelings that are impacted by the tone and the style of the other person's communication.
untog 11y ago
But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse It'll be like Facebook, where I turn for all my intelligent discourse.
- byuu 11y ago
  The point was that reasoned, articulate debate is possible (or at least, substantially easier) on sites without character limits such as Facebook (and I'm sure it's happened a few times); not that it'll suddenly be the norm if Twitter removes this artificial barrier. I am somewhat surprised I have to clarify this :/
  - Apocryphon 11y ago
    Twitter without character limits will be pretty much Tumblr. Surely there is reasoned, articulate debate there. Less flippantly, Twitter without character limits will be Medium, which was founded by Twitter co-founders. Why do we have to remove everything that makes Twitter, Twitter, in order to improve Twitter?
  - untog 11y ago
    So, reasoned and articulate debate can happen on Facebook, which has no limits, and Twitter, which does. So reasoned debate isn't really connected to character limit at all - you can be insightful or an asshole in both.
  - chipsy 11y ago
    OTOH, this thread stands as evidence that quantity isn't the bottleneck for articulation.
sib 11y ago
This suggests the potential demand for a high-quality English-to-Chinese-English plugin for Twitter? If only it were possible to effectively build 3rd party Twitter clients anymore.
- byuu 11y ago
  If you were going to bypass the character limit, I'd go with using URL encode on your message with a special domain. URLs can be substantially longer (2083 characters), and Twitter is happy to only count that as ~10 characters against your message. Then to decode it and bypass the 3rd-party client ban, release a Greasemonkey script that grabs a[title*="http://supertweets.example.com/" http://supertweets.example.com/"] and replaces the 'a' element with the URL decoded 'a.title' instead. Even better, actually register the domain, and have it be a simple script that URL decodes the path and prints it out for you, so that people don't have to install Greasemonkey to see your longer message (but doing so inlines the content.) But ... don't blame me when Twitter bans you for trying this ;)
userbinator 11y ago
Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English Someone did an interesting experiment about this: http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/10/our-paroqial-fermament-one-tide-on-another.html http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/10/our-paroqial-fermament-... In other words, the entropy of Chinese or Japanese is likely much higher than English.
jacquesm 11y ago
> Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), Mobile phone SMS did that, twitter users merely adopted the convention they were already using on their mobile phones.

by byuu 11y ago

derefr 11y ago

> You can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.) Can you really? I thought the "140 character" restriction was due to the "160 bytes in an SMS" restriction, and therefore using multibyte unicode characters consumed multiple "characters."

varjag 11y ago
Yes you absolutely can. Similarly, with Russian you'd convey a quarter less information than in English tweet, as the words are stupidly long.
mikeash 11y ago
You can try it for yourself. Go to twitter.com and put 象 into the box. The number of remaining characters only goes down by one. I don't know why that is, because I'm pretty sure you're right that the tweet length limit comes from SMS limits. But these days the 140 limit seems to be in terms of Unicode code points, not bytes.
richardwhiuk 11y ago
Twitter's web UI suggests it's allowed, and I can post 140 象 in one tweet. In practice, tweets get fragmented into multiple SMS anyway, so while this might have been the aim, it's not the implementation they've ended up with. Also, while you may wish SMS was Unicode, that's not actually likely. The number of characters you can fit in one SMS will vary depending on whether you use more than one charset, and what your operator and device support. Most SMS in the US/UK/Aus etc will be sent as 7 bit GSM, allowing for 160 characters. 8 bit allows for 140 and UCS-2 allows for 70. (This is assuming no UDH, i.e. no fragmentation)
- kuschku 11y ago
  I can send fully unicode SMS here in Germany, and while my old phone doesn’t support all the characters, it definitely displays even multibyte characters properly.
  - cbr 11y ago
    Are you sure that's SMS and not MMS or one of the other upgrades to SMS people still call SMS?
    - kuschku 11y ago
      It’s SMS, as we have to pay extra per character for sending and receiving MMS. (Yes, you can bankrupt someone by sending them a bunch of MMS)
Nadya 11y ago
They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter". It's also why Twitter is really popular in Japan. 140 characters is more than enough to hold actual conversations (even if most statements/responses are typically 12-20 characters and the rest of the space is used for emoji)
- comex 11y ago
  Which one might call a "natural experiment" for how increasing the limit would affect English speakers' use of the service. (But I don't think Twitter will do it - the number 140 is so well known, it's basically part of its identity.)
- byuu 11y ago
  I think Twitter's popularity in Japan, despite the fact that 140 characters there can convey a message that's 3-4x larger than in English, is indicative that increasing the English character count to somewhere between 280-560 (or much better, moving to word counts instead) would not be the death sentence for the service that many make it out to be.
  - laxk 11y ago
    Youalsoneedtointroducemaxwordlengthinthatcase.
    - Nadya 11y ago
      How would that work for non-spaced languages?
- e12e 11y ago
  FYI as has been posted to hn earlier wrt why sms were 160 characters, which lead to 140 character tweets w/20 characters reserved for user names: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-... It's rather interesting that the 160 character limit isn't arbitrary - but also doesn't account for eg: URLs in text.
afarrell 11y ago
Yes, this was the basis for the Ksplice longest tweet contest https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/the_1st_international_longest_tweet https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/the_1st_international...
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
SMS has 140 bytes, not 160. It allowed 160 characters because they were 7-bit.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
That was the original reason, but they only hold onto it now because that's what makes it Twitter.

ryandrake 11y ago

Yea, it's a terrible gap in our current technology that there are no other promotional or publishing platforms out there without this limit, that would allow scientists and politicians to finally convey more verbose messages. One day maybe someone will invent one.

byuu 11y ago
Snark aside, I do sympathize. It isn't Twitter's fault that it became so popular that very important people have taken to it to post things that really do not belong on a 140-character-per-message service. I also can't entirely blame the people using Twitter improperly: they need to get a message out to as many people as possible, and far too many only read Twitter; so they can't exactly ignore the platform in principle. I'm not suggesting Twitter turn into Livejournal and have no limits. I'd just like to see people not get penalized for having a language with bad character-to-word ratios, for spelling out words properly, or for having a richer vocabulary. There has to be a middle-ground between 140 characters and 300KB of text with lots of pictures and video. And if people really need to go over a reasonable limit, Twitter can streamline the process of writing a blog-post and submitting a t.co link to it. Something people already do anyway, just through other services where Twitter loses the page views (and opportunities for advertising.)
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  I wasn't aware that anything on Twitter was important.

nemothekid 11y ago

>But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. I see this thrown around a lot, but I don't think removing the 140 character limit will suddenly make Twitter a bastion of thoughtful and intelligent discourse. Twitter is huge, and the "intelligent" discourse I would expect to grow on Twitter would probably be the same "intelligent" discourse Reddit has had for years. I still believe the character limit on tweets makes it effective for users of Twitter to consume a lot of content from a wide range of people. To me, the end 140 character limit, would be the beginning of artificially curated streams (like Facebook). 50 140-char tweets from 45 different people likely has very different engagement than 10 500-word tweets from 10 people. At that point, whats the difference between Twitter and Tumblr?

thefreeman 11y ago

The most frustrating thing to me is people ahve taken to posting screenshots of their press releases that we cannot properly zoom or copy and paste. Thank god for 140 character limit!

Coding_Cat 11y ago

>Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. I don't see how abbreviations or vocabulary change the substance in any way. The only thing it changes is your mindset, and there is something to be said for adopting one's writing to this effect, but in essence: if you are swayed by someone's tone or style instead of substance then that speaks ill of you, not the speaker. edit: if you are going to be pedantic about other people's writing: `etc' should be followed by a full stop. ;) >Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings. This is a serious problem for discourse on twitter though, and people have already taken to working around the 140 character limit such as writing (1/4) and tweeting 4 times, or using twitlonger.

sigmaml 11y ago
> if you are swayed by someone's tone or style instead of substance then that speaks ill of you, not the speaker. Gratuitous arrogance! Humans have feelings that are impacted by the tone and the style of the other person's communication.

untog 11y ago

But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse It'll be like Facebook, where I turn for all my intelligent discourse.

byuu 11y ago
The point was that reasoned, articulate debate is possible (or at least, substantially easier) on sites without character limits such as Facebook (and I'm sure it's happened a few times); not that it'll suddenly be the norm if Twitter removes this artificial barrier. I am somewhat surprised I have to clarify this :/
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  Twitter without character limits will be pretty much Tumblr. Surely there is reasoned, articulate debate there. Less flippantly, Twitter without character limits will be Medium, which was founded by Twitter co-founders. Why do we have to remove everything that makes Twitter, Twitter, in order to improve Twitter?
- untog 11y ago
  So, reasoned and articulate debate can happen on Facebook, which has no limits, and Twitter, which does. So reasoned debate isn't really connected to character limit at all - you can be insightful or an asshole in both.
- chipsy 11y ago
  OTOH, this thread stands as evidence that quantity isn't the bottleneck for articulation.

sib 11y ago

This suggests the potential demand for a high-quality English-to-Chinese-English plugin for Twitter? If only it were possible to effectively build 3rd party Twitter clients anymore.

byuu 11y ago
If you were going to bypass the character limit, I'd go with using URL encode on your message with a special domain. URLs can be substantially longer (2083 characters), and Twitter is happy to only count that as ~10 characters against your message. Then to decode it and bypass the 3rd-party client ban, release a Greasemonkey script that grabs a[title*="http://supertweets.example.com/" http://supertweets.example.com/"] and replaces the 'a' element with the URL decoded 'a.title' instead. Even better, actually register the domain, and have it be a simple script that URL decodes the path and prints it out for you, so that people don't have to install Greasemonkey to see your longer message (but doing so inlines the content.) But ... don't blame me when Twitter bans you for trying this ;)

userbinator 11y ago

Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English Someone did an interesting experiment about this: http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/10/our-paroqial-fermament-one-tide-on-another.html http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/10/our-paroqial-fermament-... In other words, the entropy of Chinese or Japanese is likely much higher than English.

jacquesm 11y ago

> Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), Mobile phone SMS did that, twitter users merely adopted the convention they were already using on their mobile phones.